Unlike cheerleading, ultimate frisbee and flip cup, one feature of US higher education that has struggled to cross the Atlantic is the concept of small, campus-based, liberal arts colleges. These tiny private institutions may seem completely different from the UK’s typically large, research-intensive, state-funded universities. But, with its focus on both teaching and research, holistic

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is the Director of the Vatican Observatory; he has been a great help to the Studium and is providing materials and guidance for the planning of the astronomy component of our science programme. He is a great speaker!

We saw revivals of classical learning in western Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, each different, each bringing its own distinctive feel and timbre to the process, which was always seen as a vital route to the refreshment of our culture. The fifteenth and sixteenth century revivals went

A very refreshing, consistent theme of the synod has been inclusion. The Church, our spiritual family, welcomes everyone, especially those who may feel excluded. Among those, I’ve heard the synod fathers and observers comment, are the single, those with same-sex attraction, those divorced, widowed, or recently arrived in a new country, those with disabilities, the

Let us first be clear about the meaning of the liberal arts and liberal educations. The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy,

Here is what the great humanist bishop and Catholic martyr, St John Fisher had to say to critics of the Papacy: Perhaps some may say, “Nowhere else is the life of Christians more contrary to Christ than in Rome, and that, too, even among the prelates of the Church, whose conversation is diametrically opposed to

At the Battle of Lepanto, 444 years ago yesterday, Europe was saved from being over-run by the Turks. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–78), describes how tall Islamic minarets could have been seen in Oxford before his birth, and the accents in its markets would have been Arabic: “The

David Brooks in yesterday’s New York Times regrets that universities, founded for religious reasons, have largely abandoned the transmission of beliefs, values and morals. He notes that there are now signs of a resurgence. “Many American universities were founded as religious institutions, explicitly designed to cultivate their students’ spiritual and moral natures. But over the